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Apr. 23rd, 2007 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seiberwingSo, in honor of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, here is my offering of original material on the intarwebs.
Bare Bones
There was a pair of abandoned, moss-covered docks floating at the very end of my dead-end street, where pavement and trees met the lake. They had no signs, no boats tied up alongside them, no owner but the creeping moss on the rotting boards and the algae on their ragged-edged plastic buoys.
Behind the docks lay a vine-covered ravine and the skeleton of a house, barely started and then left behind for no apparent reason. Half of it was filled with a slowly growing hill of used diapers, rusting cans, and decaying organic matter of dubious origin. The rest was moss-covered cinderblocks and Godzilla-esque mounds of climbing kudzu weed. They served as a neighborhood dump, a temporary ‘hibernation cave’ for my little brother when he took it into his head to run away from home, and my personal treasure horde. By the time I was old enough to traverse the length of the neighborhood on my own, I’d claimed the entire area as my personal territory
I had a habit of gathering items that appeared along the shoreline, picking up gleaming shells, crude rose quartz, and oddly shaped pieces of driftwood that had caught my eye for one reason or another and stashing them under my bed. My collection occasionally took a turn for the macabre, and included a crow’s wing and a twisted mass of rabbit fur and bone.
One hot summer afternoon, I stumbled over the skull of a large dog lying amidst the water-polished stones. A bit of prowling in the bushes and poking about near the moldering abandoned house turned up a half-eaten dog carcass. It was a beautiful find, with tufts of wiry black hair poking up in patches and the ribs half-visible inside the chest cavity. The strong smell of rotting flesh nearly made me vomit, and I had to hold my breath just to get close enough.
I trusted in my superior immune system to protect me from any sort of canine post-mortem diseases and dragged the corpse out of the woods with my bare hands, leaving it out on the dock to rot. The only pity was that the front legs weren’t attached, and I had no reason to mourn the dog’s departure. The he or she was long gone, and only the it, the body, remained.
I left the body to rot in the sun for a few weeks, shaking it out every day to get rid of the nestling maggots, fascinated by the rotting flesh slowly peeling away from the bones. The odor grew to horrendous levels, a new wave of nauseating fumes wafting out every time I repositioned the corpse. Still, this didn’t dim my fascination with the decaying carcass. I even brought my brother out with me to share in the joy of watching the intestines shrivel and become flexible stretchy cord inside the slim ribcage. He deemed it disgusting but examined it with the same interest as I had, poking gingerly at it with a long stick.
About three weeks into the process, the skull was stolen by Nick, a black lab that lived at the marina next door and sometimes came over to engage in doomed mating attempts with my golden retriever. It took me almost twenty minutes to chase it along the lakeside and wrest the skull from his mouth. The entire encounter was rather bizarre and I twice threatened the dog with taking his own skull as a replacement. Nick did not take me up on the offer, sadly enough, or I would have had two canine specimens to play with and my dog would have suffered a severe dent in her love life.
When I felt the body was sufficiently decomposed and pulling tissue off with my hands and a pair of pliers began to become arduous, I sought out other means. The next night, when the fireflies were just starting to appear in the shadows of the bushes and the cicadas shrilled their songs into the night air, I snuck what was left of the corpse back to the house. Working undercover, I took a tub full of bleach out under the patio, knelt in the dirt and let the bones soak, watching the remaining flesh melt away in the dim light. The patches of tissue felt like slime molds against my fingers and looked like squishy sponges as they dissolved in patches. As spine-crawlingly disgusting as the irregular blobs were, I had trouble looking away. It was just too horrific, too enticing not to enjoy to the fullest. The flesh and hair swirled around in the bottom of the tub as I scraped the bones, being as intimate as I could with every part of the process even as the bleach stung my hands.
It was dark by the time the bones gleamed clean and white under the porch lights. The smell of rot and bleach wafted through the night while I rinsed the bare bones under the faucet and dried them with a dishtowel. My fingers were wrinkled and prickling, and the fumes from the bleach were starting to make my head spin. I poured it out in the bushes and took deep, shuddering breaths as I turned the bones over in my hands.
Once I’d convinced my parents that having a large portion of a dog’s skeleton as a trophy was perfectly normal for a child of my age, I proudly laid the bones out on my desk and attempted to reassemble them into a reasonable sort of skeleton, chasing my brother around the house with a set of chattering canine jaws when he tried to join in.
My Christmas assignment in fifth grade instructed me to create an ornament with household items, such as Popsicle sticks and tissue paper. Other students made clay candy canes, small clothespin dolls with wire hangers, or plastic angels in garish red and green. My ornament featured two slender tibias ornately tied together with pink ribbon and topped with a plastic red bow.
In retrospect, I begin to see why I spent so much time in the school counselor’s office.
Bare Bones
There was a pair of abandoned, moss-covered docks floating at the very end of my dead-end street, where pavement and trees met the lake. They had no signs, no boats tied up alongside them, no owner but the creeping moss on the rotting boards and the algae on their ragged-edged plastic buoys.
Behind the docks lay a vine-covered ravine and the skeleton of a house, barely started and then left behind for no apparent reason. Half of it was filled with a slowly growing hill of used diapers, rusting cans, and decaying organic matter of dubious origin. The rest was moss-covered cinderblocks and Godzilla-esque mounds of climbing kudzu weed. They served as a neighborhood dump, a temporary ‘hibernation cave’ for my little brother when he took it into his head to run away from home, and my personal treasure horde. By the time I was old enough to traverse the length of the neighborhood on my own, I’d claimed the entire area as my personal territory
I had a habit of gathering items that appeared along the shoreline, picking up gleaming shells, crude rose quartz, and oddly shaped pieces of driftwood that had caught my eye for one reason or another and stashing them under my bed. My collection occasionally took a turn for the macabre, and included a crow’s wing and a twisted mass of rabbit fur and bone.
One hot summer afternoon, I stumbled over the skull of a large dog lying amidst the water-polished stones. A bit of prowling in the bushes and poking about near the moldering abandoned house turned up a half-eaten dog carcass. It was a beautiful find, with tufts of wiry black hair poking up in patches and the ribs half-visible inside the chest cavity. The strong smell of rotting flesh nearly made me vomit, and I had to hold my breath just to get close enough.
I trusted in my superior immune system to protect me from any sort of canine post-mortem diseases and dragged the corpse out of the woods with my bare hands, leaving it out on the dock to rot. The only pity was that the front legs weren’t attached, and I had no reason to mourn the dog’s departure. The he or she was long gone, and only the it, the body, remained.
I left the body to rot in the sun for a few weeks, shaking it out every day to get rid of the nestling maggots, fascinated by the rotting flesh slowly peeling away from the bones. The odor grew to horrendous levels, a new wave of nauseating fumes wafting out every time I repositioned the corpse. Still, this didn’t dim my fascination with the decaying carcass. I even brought my brother out with me to share in the joy of watching the intestines shrivel and become flexible stretchy cord inside the slim ribcage. He deemed it disgusting but examined it with the same interest as I had, poking gingerly at it with a long stick.
About three weeks into the process, the skull was stolen by Nick, a black lab that lived at the marina next door and sometimes came over to engage in doomed mating attempts with my golden retriever. It took me almost twenty minutes to chase it along the lakeside and wrest the skull from his mouth. The entire encounter was rather bizarre and I twice threatened the dog with taking his own skull as a replacement. Nick did not take me up on the offer, sadly enough, or I would have had two canine specimens to play with and my dog would have suffered a severe dent in her love life.
When I felt the body was sufficiently decomposed and pulling tissue off with my hands and a pair of pliers began to become arduous, I sought out other means. The next night, when the fireflies were just starting to appear in the shadows of the bushes and the cicadas shrilled their songs into the night air, I snuck what was left of the corpse back to the house. Working undercover, I took a tub full of bleach out under the patio, knelt in the dirt and let the bones soak, watching the remaining flesh melt away in the dim light. The patches of tissue felt like slime molds against my fingers and looked like squishy sponges as they dissolved in patches. As spine-crawlingly disgusting as the irregular blobs were, I had trouble looking away. It was just too horrific, too enticing not to enjoy to the fullest. The flesh and hair swirled around in the bottom of the tub as I scraped the bones, being as intimate as I could with every part of the process even as the bleach stung my hands.
It was dark by the time the bones gleamed clean and white under the porch lights. The smell of rot and bleach wafted through the night while I rinsed the bare bones under the faucet and dried them with a dishtowel. My fingers were wrinkled and prickling, and the fumes from the bleach were starting to make my head spin. I poured it out in the bushes and took deep, shuddering breaths as I turned the bones over in my hands.
Once I’d convinced my parents that having a large portion of a dog’s skeleton as a trophy was perfectly normal for a child of my age, I proudly laid the bones out on my desk and attempted to reassemble them into a reasonable sort of skeleton, chasing my brother around the house with a set of chattering canine jaws when he tried to join in.
My Christmas assignment in fifth grade instructed me to create an ornament with household items, such as Popsicle sticks and tissue paper. Other students made clay candy canes, small clothespin dolls with wire hangers, or plastic angels in garish red and green. My ornament featured two slender tibias ornately tied together with pink ribbon and topped with a plastic red bow.
In retrospect, I begin to see why I spent so much time in the school counselor’s office.
